For the Record (2023)

Co-Producer for Director Heather Courtney’s short film about the struggles of owner/editor Laurie Ezzell Brown to keep her award winning small town Texas Panhandle newspaper, the Canadian Record, alive.

Over four years of filming, Brown strives to keep the town’s paper and her family’s legacy alive despite an oil bust, a global pandemic, the threat of wildfires, and a growing mistrust of the media. In a county that voted 87% for Donald Trump twice, but loves the quality of its local paper, no matter its liberal editorial opinions, the same economics creating news deserts across the country, as papers close, is the ultimate challenge.

“No one else is going to tell the stories we’re telling, and in the way we’re telling them. If you want to get people to consider thinking a different way, you have to start on common ground, from a place where you are pretty close to each other and go from there. It’s a way to move the conversation forward, and that’s what I try to do.”

- Laurie Brown, Publisher and Editor, The Canadian Record

Directed by award winning filmmaker Heather Courtney, edited by Karen Skloss, and produced by Paul Stekler, with major funding from Arnold Ventures. The premiered at the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula, Montana in 2023 and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Reel South series in 2024.